Graveyards are oases: places of escape, of peace and reflection. Each is
a garden or nature reserve, but also a site of commemoration, where the
past is close enough to touch: a liminal place, at the border of the
living world.
Jean Sprackland's prize-winning book, Strands, brought to life the
histories of objects found on a beach. These Silent Mansions is also
an uncovering of individual stories: vivid, touching and intimately
told. Sprackland travels back through her own life, revisiting
graveyards in the ordinary towns and cities she has called home, seeking
out others who lived, died and are remembered or forgotten there. With
her poet's eye, she makes chance discoveries among the stones and
inscriptions: a notorious smuggler tucked up in a sleepy churchyard;
ancient coins unearthed on a secret burial ground; a slow-worm basking
in the sun.
These Silent Mansions is an elegant, exhilarating meditation on the
relationship between the living and the dead, the nature of time and
loss, and how - in this restless, accelerated world - we can connect the
here with the elsewhere, the present with the past.